Team leadership

Despite the ubiquity of leadership influences on organizational team performance and the large literatures on leadership and team/group dynamics, we know surprisingly little about how leaders create and handle effective teams. In this article, we focus on leader–team dynamics through the lens of “functional leadership.” This approach essentially asserts that the leader's main job is to do, or get done, whatever functions are not being handled adequately in terms of group needs. We explicate this functional leadership approach in terms of 4 superordinate and 13 subordinate leadership dimensions and relate these to team effectiveness and a range of team processes. We also develop a number of guiding propositions. A key point in considering such relationships is the reciprocal influence, whereby both leadership and team processes influence each other.     

Democracy as a transitional compass: women’s participation in South Africa and Kerala,India

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the attempts by the states in South Africa and Kerala to create spaces for public participation by specifically focusing on women’s involvement in local spaces. Democracy is a crucial part of any emancipatory future that seeks to challenge and overcome inequality. I show that both states have ‘invited’ participation by women in various ways, but that the transformative potential of this participation is limited by national political economy, bureaucratization, and the lack of political will. In South Africa, the invited spaces eventually transformed into avenues for delivery and in response the women in this study shifted to inventing ways to engage in development in their personal lives. By using a double comparison – South Africa over time and South Africa compared to India – I argue that transformative politics requires a combination of invented and invited spaces.     

Why Extended Time on Newstart is Unsuitable for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians Living with a Disability

ABSTRACT

Many Australians living with a disability find themselves recipients of Newstart Allowance when applying for the Disability Support Pension (DSP). Newstart Allowance is designed as a short-term payment for people looking for work, with a lower fortnightly payment and limited medical and transport subsidies compared to the DSP. This paper describes the financial challenges of living with a disability while on Newstart Allowance. With a focus on the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) Australians from two regional towns, qualitative semistructured interviews and focus groups documented experiences of 39 community members and 21 medical and nonmedical service providers supporting clients living with a disability on Newstart Allowance. Four themes were identified: (i) living with severe financial hardship, (ii) challenges complying with the DSP application, (iii) being financially penalised for not complying with Newstart Allowance conditions, and (iv) supporting community members to manage severe financial stress. Although people living with a disability on Newstart were experiencing severe hardship and poverty, there was limited participation of Centrelink-employed social workers within their described experiences with Centrelink. We argue that social workers can work to humanise human service settings and potentially help to mitigate these financial challenges.

IMPLICATIONS

• Indigenous Australians living with a disability experience severe disadvantage and poverty while living on Newstart Allowance.

• Social workers must be easily accessible at Centrelink customer service centres and to Newstart Allowance recipients to help coordinate service engagement.

• Newstart Allowance should be increased to ensure recipients can respond to cost of living pressures.

     

When data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice

ABSTRACT

Environmental data justice (EDJ) emerges from conversations between data justice and environmental justice while identifying the limits and tensions of these lenses. Through a reflexive process of querying our entanglement in non-innocent relations, this paper develops and engages EDJ by examining how it informs the work of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), a distributed, consensus-based organization that formed in response to the 2016 US presidential election. Through grassroots archiving of data sets, monitoring federal environmental and energy agency websites, and writing rapid-response reports about how federal agencies are being undermined, EDGI mobilizes EDJ to challenge the ‘extractive logic’ of current federal environmental policy and data infrastructures. ‘Extractive logic’ disconnects data from provenance, privileges the matrix of domination, and whitewashes data to generate uncertainty. We use the dynamic EDJ framework to reflect on EDGI’s public comment advising against the US Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule for Transparent Science. Through EDJ, EDGI aspires to create new environmental data infrastructures and practices that are participatory and embody equitable, transparent data care.     

Navigating “Breakup Remorse”: Implications for Disrupting the On-Again/Off-Again Cycles in Young Adult Dating Relationships

While the research is clear on the risks for distress associated with on-again, off-again romantic relationships (i.e., cyclical relationships), little is known about the change mechanisms experienced by partners in cyclical relationships or how helping professionals can assist young adults stably continue or end these relationships. Young adults (N = 21) in different stages of cyclical relationships (renewed, ended, or contemplating renewal) attended focus groups and articulated specific mechanisms that influenced their ability to make distress-reducing decisions. Main themes for professionals working with partners in cyclical relationships centered on promoting “decision-making resilience,” which included addressing issues around identity development, communication, power/control dynamics, and intentionality. These results inform assessments and interventions to bolster resilience and reduce distress for cyclical couples.     

Conflict and Cooperation in Diverse Workgroups

This article reviews research examining the influence of diversity on conflict and cooperation within the context of the workplace. In particular, we describe how heterogeneity in surface characteristics, such as race and gender, as well as deeper characteristics, such as affect, experience, and knowledge, relate to key workgroup processes and outcomes. Of particular interest is the disparate strength and directionality of the effects reported in the literature. In an effort to provide clarity to the confusion, we emphasize the roles of group longevity and the type of diversity being examined. In addition, we recommend greater specificity with respect to the particular group processes and outcomes being examined.